Areas of Work
We organize our work systematically across decision domains to shape effective enterprise energy outcomes.
Energy does not divide itself neatly into service categories. Consumption, cost, risk, infrastructure, operations, markets, utility structures, technology, capital, and enterprise objectives interact. The decisions made in one area can change the economics, constraints, or opportunities in another.
Consilient Energy therefore organizes its work systematically across the major decision domains through which enterprises understand and manage energy.
Some needs are concentrated within one domain. Others span several. The most consequential often require them to be considered together.
In every case, we begin with the objective, determine what must be understood, examine the relationships that shape the problem, and develop the framework required to support sound decisions and disciplined execution.
A comprehensive and unified view of enterprise energy
Effective energy outcomes are the result of interacting systems. We work across domains, within the context of your enterprise objectives and constraints, to develop and execute a unified energy strategy.
Energy
Energy Data & Information
Compile and manage complete & accurate energy data & information.
Markets, Supply & Risk
Manage market participation and exposure.
Utility Service & Rates
Understand and manage utility service & cost.
Facility Energy & Operations
Understand what creates demand and where change creates value.
Technology, Infrastructure & Capital
Determine where technology and capital should be applied.
Energy Data & Information
Organize and manage complete and accurate energy data and information.
Effective energy management depends on good information. Building a foundation of good information requires identifying, compiling, organizing, and carefully managing the source data that ultimately drives decisions.
Executing an effective energy information strategy requires knowing what data is available, how it can be sourced, how errors, inconsistencies, and gaps will be identified and remedied, and how different data should be connected with enterprise context to support analysis and decision-making.
Important questions include:
What sources of information do we have available for energy consumption and expenditure across the enterprise, and how reliable are those sources?
How do we connect information on consumption and expenditure with facility and operational data to better understand what drives consumption and expenditure?
What sources of information do we have on utility rates and energy market structures and prices, and how can those sources be connected to information on facilities, operations, consumption, and expenditure to support the analyses that are required for sound decision-making?
What information is required to support budgeting, forecasting, market decisions, capital evaluation, and performance management elsewhere in the energy system?
What controls are required to maintain reliable information as facilities, accounts, utilities, and operating conditions change?
Organizations must develop and maintain a robust energy data and information architecture – along with supporting processes, systems, and frameworks – to support effective decision-making across each of the energy decision domains. Without complete, accurate, current, and well-organized data – and an understanding of how the elements of the data architecture are related – effective enterprise energy management is impossible.
Consilient works with clients to develop and implement a robust energy data and information strategy and framework. We bring a structured approach to exploring data needs and opportunities, organizing and developing effective systems and processes to source and manage data, and building relationships and frameworks to convert data into good information that drives sound decision-making.
Markets, Supply & Risk
Decide deliberately how the enterprise will participate in energy markets.
Every organization that consumes energy has market exposure. Much of that exposure may be explicit, reflected in commodity positions, prices, and supply contracts. Some may arise indirectly through utility rate adjustments, regulatory impacts, and the availability and cost of energy resources.
The central question goes beyond who to buy from, or even when to buy. It is how the enterprise should best understand and manage the economic exposure associated with energy markets, while supporting its operating and financial objectives.
Important questions include:
What market exposures does the enterprise have?
Which risks should be retained, managed, transferred, or avoided?
How should operating requirements and load characteristics influence supply management decisions?
What commercial structures are appropriate for the risks and objectives involved?
How should current and expected market conditions influence decisions without allowing short-term market views to substitute for strategy?
What level of price certainty, flexibility, and opportunity is appropriate?
What’s happening in the energy marketplace that can influence future plans for growth or financial performance?
How should energy market conditions be incorporated into future planning and budgeting?
What decision rights, limits, and governance should control market activity over time?
How should performance be evaluated against the objectives the strategy was designed to achieve?
These questions are related.
A supply structure that provides greater price certainty may reduce flexibility or opportunity. A purchasing strategy that appears attractive under one market scenario may behave differently as load, operations, tariffs, or business conditions change. Decisions appropriate for one facility or jurisdiction may not translate cleanly across an enterprise portfolio.
Consilient approaches markets, supply, and risk as a decision system.
We help clients characterize exposure, establish objectives and risk tolerances, evaluate alternatives, develop decision frameworks and governance, interpret market information, structure commercial approaches, support market transactions, and measure results against the purposes those decisions were intended to serve.
Our work reaches beyond simple procurement and timing. We help clients make deliberate, informed choices about energy-market exposure and manage those choices consistently over time through robust frameworks.
Utility Service & Rates
Understand how utility service parameters, operations, and rates influence enterprise energy economics and support enterprise operations.
Utility service to facilities across an enterprise is delivered through a patchwork system of rates, tariffs, procedures, and rules. Understanding key aspects and dynamics of each of these elements, and how these factors can affect energy expenditures, facility operations, and enterprise growth is a cornerstone of effective energy management.
By understanding how utility rate structures convert physical energy use into cost, the rules and procedures which bind utilities and their customers and govern the relationship between them, how these rates and rules may change over time, and what levers and options are available across facilities, organizations can avoid unnecessary expenditures, utility service issues, and costly delays and outages.
Important questions include:
How do utility structures, rates, tariffs, and charges drive facility cost?
What elections are available that can favorably impact facility economics or operations?
How can we reliably identify anomalies or unexplained variance to spot errors and leakage that can be remediated?
How would changes in load, operations, technology, or infrastructure alter utility economics?
How do utility service parameters and availability affect enterprise plans for growth and expansion?
Which utility rules and procedures can, if improperly managed, affect service availability, reliability, or cost?
Understanding the full parameters associated with utility service can reveal important relationships that may be missed when rates and bills are considered separately from operations.
- The same change in consumption can have very different financial consequences under different tariff structures.
- A technology investment may appear attractive or unattractive depending on how it changes demand, timing, or rate applicability.
- A cost variance may originate in operations, utility treatment, data quality, or some combination of the three.
- Opting in or out of various utility service riders can affect direct utility costs and eligibility for high-value programs and incentives.
- Utility rules and procedures for establishing service, opening, closing, or transferring accounts, or interconnecting and operating distributed energy resources can have significant impacts on energy costs and facility operations and economics.
Consilient works to make those relationships explicit.
Our work in this domain can include utility-economic analysis, tariff and rate modeling, consumption and expenditure analysis, anomaly and cost-leakage investigation, budgeting and forecasting, information architecture, performance measurement, and the development of controls and processes required to maintain reliable and cost-effective utility service over time.
The objective is to make utility services understandable and manageable, and to build the systems and frameworks to support the decisions that drive effective enterprise energy management.
Facility Energy & Operations
Understand how operations create energy demand, and what should change.
Energy consumption is an output of the way a facility is designed, equipped, operated, and used.
Loads arise from physical assets and processes, but also from production requirements, operating schedules, controls, maintenance practices, occupancy, environmental conditions, reliability needs, and decisions made elsewhere in the enterprise.
Developing a comprehensive, facility-level understanding of where energy is being consumed, why that demand exists, what purpose it serves, how it behaves over time, and which changes can improve performance without creating unacceptable consequences elsewhere is a cornerstone of effective energy management.
Important questions include:
Which facilities, systems, equipment, and processes drive energy demand?
What operating requirements explain when, where, and how that demand occurs?
Which consumption is necessary to support the underlying business objective, and which may be avoidable or inefficient?
Where can operating practices, controls, maintenance, equipment, or process design materially change energy use?
How do changes in demand affect utility costs, market exposure, infrastructure requirements, reliability, and other enterprise objectives?
Which opportunities require operational changes, and which require capital?
What tradeoffs exist among energy performance, production, comfort, reliability, maintenance, quality, and operating flexibility?
How should potential interventions be evaluated and prioritized?
These questions require more than identifying technically possible energy reductions.
A measure that reduces consumption may have little economic value under a particular cost structure. A load-management opportunity may conflict with operating requirements. A capital project may improve efficiency but compete poorly with operational changes requiring little investment. An intervention at one facility may not justify enterprise-wide adoption.
Consilient approaches facility energy through the relationship between physical systems, operating requirements, and economic outcomes.
Our work in this domain can include facility and portfolio energy analysis, load characterization, operational and process assessment, efficiency and demand-opportunity evaluation, benchmarking, control-strategy analysis, measurement and performance frameworks, opportunity prioritization, and the development of implementation plans.
By understanding how energy supports the operation, and identifying where change creates meaningful value, we can improve performance without losing sight of the broader system the facility serves.
Technology, Infrastructure & Capital
Apply technology and capital where they create the greatest value.
New equipment, distributed energy resources, infrastructure, controls, and other technologies can materially improve cost, reliability, resilience, operating performance, or environmental outcomes. They can also consume substantial capital, create new operating requirements, introduce unfamiliar risks, or solve problems that could have been addressed more effectively another way.
A consilient approach to energy technology asks where technology and capital should be applied, which alternatives best serve the underlying need, and how investments should be structured and prioritized.
Important questions include:
What problems, needs, or opportunities can be addressed through the application of technology?
How do different technologies fit with the facility's physical and operating requirements, and potentially with each other?
What alternatives, including operational or non-capital alternatives, should be considered?
How would the technology investments or commitments interact with energy demand, utility economics, market exposure, infrastructure, reliability, and other enterprise objectives?
What are the full economic consequences across the expected life of the project?
What technical, operating, commercial, regulatory, and implementation considerations should factor into facility technology decisions?
What ownership, financing, contracting, or commercial structures best fit the enterprise's objectives and constraints?
How should projects be compared and prioritized across facilities or the enterprise?
What implementation structure is required to convert the business case into the intended result?
These questions become particularly important when individual technologies participate in several parts of the energy system at once.
A storage system, for example, may affect utility demand charges, market participation, resilience, facility operations, capital requirements, and future infrastructure needs. On-site generation can alter supply exposure while creating new fuel, operating, maintenance, permitting, and commercial considerations. Efficiency projects may be shaped to complement other energy, resilience, or production initiatives.
Technology decisions should therefore be evaluated through the system they will affect.
Consilient helps clients define the need, evaluate technical and non-technical alternatives, develop economic and decision frameworks, assess risk, evaluate commercial and ownership structures, prioritize projects, select solutions and counterparties, and develop implementation plans.
Our work can include technology screening, technical and economic assessment, distributed energy and resilience analysis, infrastructure planning, business-case development, lifecycle economics, commercial-structure evaluation, procurement and selection support, portfolio prioritization, and implementation planning.
Our work supports sound decisions that improve the performance of the energy system and the enterprise it serves.
Governing context
Enterprise Objectives & Constraints
Energy decisions are made in the service of the enterprise.
Organizations may seek lower cost, greater resilience, reduced emissions, improved operating performance, greater price certainty, growth capacity, regulatory compliance, or progress against environmental commitments. At the same time, operating requirements, contractual obligations, risk tolerance, organizational capacity, capital availability, feasibility of long-term commitments, and other constraints limit the range of practical choices.
These considerations should be embedded within and help define energy decision-making structures and processes.
Important questions include:
What are the broad outcomes that the enterprise is trying to achieve?
Which objectives are requirements, which are preferences, and which represent opportunities?
What time horizons apply to different objectives and commitments?
Where do financial, operating, resilience, environmental, growth, or other objectives reinforce one another?
Where do they conflict or create meaningful tradeoffs?
What constraints materially limit the available choices?
How should capital, risk management, organizational capacity, long-term facility plans, and implementation requirements influence priorities?
How should sustainability and renewable energy objectives interact with supply, facility, utility, technology, and capital decisions?
What should be measured to determine how well enterprise objectives are being advanced?
Individual energy decisions can appear attractive when evaluated against one objective while performing poorly against the enterprise's broader requirements.
A basic, fully fixed, unitized-cost energy supply strategy may provide simplicity and near-term budget certainty while embedding a higher long-term cost structure. A resilience investment may require capital or long-term commitment that competes with efficiency or production priorities. An emissions objective may be pursued through several combinations of operational changes, renewable supply, technology investments, or commercial instruments, each with different economics and risks.
The relevant objectives and constraints therefore need to be made explicit and considered together.
Consilient helps clients make enterprise objectives and constraints explicit, clarify tradeoffs, evaluate alternative pathways, establish decision criteria, and incorporate those considerations into frameworks and priorities across the energy system.
Our work in this area can include enterprise energy objective setting, scenario and pathway analysis, resilience strategy, emissions and renewable-energy planning, regulatory and commercial assessment, prioritization frameworks, performance measurement, and the integration of energy initiatives with broader business and capital plans.
Through a consilient approach, we can support energy decisions that advance the enterprise's priorities coherently, deliberately, and within the constraints under which the organization actually operates.
Coordinating structure
Enterprise Energy Strategy
Coordinate energy decisions across the enterprise.
The most consequential energy needs often span multiple decision domains at once.
Market exposure cannot be managed independently of load. Utility economics influence technology value. Facility operations affect supply requirements. Capital decisions compete across projects. Environmental and resilience objectives may alter choices throughout the system.
When these relationships become sufficiently important, managing the individual domains well is no longer enough.
The enterprise also needs a structure for managing them together.
Important questions include:
Which decisions should be made centrally, and which should remain within facilities, business units, or operating functions?
Where do decisions in different energy domains depend upon or constrain one another?
What information should be shared across those decisions?
How should competing opportunities, risks, and capital requirements be evaluated against one another?
What sequence of decisions and initiatives will produce the strongest overall result?
What governance, decision rights, responsibilities, and controls are required?
How should performance be measured across domains and at the enterprise level?
How should the enterprise adapt as markets, operations, technologies, regulations, and business priorities change?
Enterprise energy strategy is the structure that allows decisions across the energy system to be coordinated in service of the enterprise.
A supply strategy may need to anticipate future load changes. A facility investment may alter tariff exposure or market risk. A renewable-energy commitment may influence procurement, infrastructure, or capital decisions. An attractive project in isolation may become less compelling when compared with opportunities elsewhere in the portfolio.
These relationships should be made explicit rather than managed accidentally.
Consilient helps clients develop the enterprise-level frameworks, priorities, governance, information structures, and decision processes required to coordinate energy activity across domains.
Our work can include enterprise energy assessment, objective and priority setting, cross-domain analysis, decision and governance architecture, initiative and capital prioritization, organizational roles and responsibilities, performance frameworks, implementation sequencing, and the development of enterprise energy plans.
The purpose is to create coherence across energy decisions that would otherwise be made separately.
Through a consilient approach, the enterprise can manage energy as a coordinated body of decisions rather than a collection of unrelated activities.